The scramble for pole position in the race to provide the definitive subscription-based music website is revving up, with all five major record labels, along with two portals, announcing they were setting up rival services.

AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and EMI will jointly own MusicNet, while RealNetworks will have the privilege of being the sole distributor. The consortium represents 40 per cent of music sales in the US.

Bertelsmann still has an agreement with Napster to form a website with a subscription model, and has plans to group its other music retail activities, including CDNow, into a unit called BeMusic.

Hot on the heels of this venture is Sony and Universal's Duet. The two companies boast 47 per cent of US music sales. Although they're finalising key aspects of the service, the pair plan to have it up and running this summer through Yahoo.

While you can't download and store tracks, Microsoft's new MSN.music is a free online service that streams music, or transmits it for listening to on a user's computer without being stored as a file on the hard drive. At the moment it is only available in the US.

For some observers these moves signal the music industry's awareness of the internet's potential. Others say it is merely complicating the distribution model of online music and that users will soon be singing the blues.